Becoming a Founder

Just as Larry and sergey laid the foundation for how Google treats its people, you can lay the foundation for how your team works and lives

Every great tale starts with an origin story.

The infants Romulus and Remus, abandoned, and then raised by kindly shepherds. As a young man. Romulus goes on to found the city of Rome. Baby Kal-El rockets to earth as his home planet Krypton explodes behind him, landing in Smallville, Kansas,to be raised by the kindly Martha and Jonathan Kent. Moving to Metropolis, h takes on the mantle of Superman.

Thomas Alva Edison opens a lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. He brings together an American mathematician, an English machinist, a German glassblower, and a Swiss clock maker who develop an incandescent lightbulb that burns for more than thirteen hours. Laying the foundation for the Edision General Electrical Company.

Oprah Winfey, born of a impoverished teenage mother, abused as a child, and shuttled from home to home, goes on to become an honors student, the youngest and first black news anchor at WLAC-TV in Nashville, and one of the most successful communicators and inspirational businesspeople in the world.

Vastly different tales, yet all teasingly similar. The mythologist Joseph Campbell that there are just a few archetypal stories that underpin most myths around the world. We are called to an adventure, face a series of trials, become wiser, and then find some manner of mastery or peace. We humans live through narrative, viewing history though a lens of stories that we tell ourselves. No wonder that we find common threads in the tapestries of one another’s lives.

Google has an origin story too. most think it began when LarryPage and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, met during a campus tour for new students at Standford University. But it starts much earlier than that.

Larry’s views were shaped by his family history: “My grandfather was an automaker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It’s a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. He explained, ” The workers made them during the sit-down strikes to protect themselves.

Sergey’s family had detected from the Soviet Union in 1979, seeking freedom and a respite from the anti-Semitism of the Communist regime. “My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow,” explained Sergey. “I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”

Larry’s and Sergey’s ideas about how work could be were also informed by their early experiences at school. As Sergey has commented: “I do think I benefited from the Montessori education, which in some ways gives the students a lot more freedoms to do things at their own pace.” Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google voice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.” This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their own volition, and create.